Name the isolation requirement
Dedicated hardware can reduce noisy-neighbor risk and make resource ceilings easier to reason about. It does not automatically provide redundancy, managed security, fast recovery, or better application performance.
List the requirement that shared or virtual infrastructure cannot meet: sustained CPU, specialized storage, licensing, network policy, hardware access, or predictable latency.
- Failure domain
- Replacement time
- Remote access path
- Backup destination
Assign every operating task
Write down who patches firmware, operating system, runtime, database, monitoring agent, and control plane. Confirm how a failed disk, power supply, motherboard, or network port is detected and replaced.
A single powerful server can still be a single failure boundary. Recovery should be tested onto different hardware, not assumed from a RAID label.
Disable the server in a rehearsal and recover the service from documented artifacts without depending on its local disks.